The New "Great Game" in
the Caspian Sea

Back to the beginning
of the article (which was published in January
1996).

Yugoslavia is significant
not just for its own position on the map, but also for the areas to which
it allows access. And influential American analysts believe that it lies
close to a zone of vital US interests, the Black Sea-Caspian Sea region.

This may be the real significance
of the NATO task force in Yugoslavia.

The United States is now seeking
to consolidate a new European-Middle Eastern bloc of nations. It is presenting
itself as the leader of an informal grouping of Muslim countries stretching
from the Persian Gulf into the Balkans. This grouping includes Turkey,
which is of pivotal importance in the emerging new bloc. Turkey is not
just a part of the southern Balkans and an Aegean power. It also borders
on Iraq, Iran and Syria. It thus connects southern Europe to the Middle
East, where the US considers that it has vital interests.

The US hopes to expand this
informal alliance with Muslim states in the Middle East and southern Europe
to include some of the new nations on the southern rim of the former Soviet
Union.

The reasons are not far to
seek. The US now conceives of itself as being engaged in a new race for
world resources. Oil is especially important in this race. With the war
against Iraq, the US established itself in the Middle East more securely
than ever. The almost simultaneous disintegration of the Soviet Union opened
the possiblity of Western exploitation of the oil resources of the Caspian
Sea region.

This region is extremely rich
in oil and gas resources. Some Western analysts believe that it could become
as important to the West as the Persian Gulf Countries like Kazakhstan
have enormous oil deposits. Its recopverable reserves probably exceed 9
billion barrels. Kazakhstan could probably pump 700,000 barrels a day.
The problem, as in other countries of the region, at least from the perspective
of Western countries, has been to get the oil and gas resources out of
the region and to the West by safe routes.

The movement of this oil and
gas is not simply a technical problem. It is also political. It is of crucial
importance to the US and to other Western countries today to maintain friendly
relations with countries like Kazakhstan. More importantly, it is important
to know that that any rights acquired, to pump petroleum or to build pipelines
to transport it, will be absolutely respected. For the amounts which are
projected for investment in the region are very large.

What this means is that Western
producers, banks, pipeline companies, etc. want to be assured of "political
stability" in the region. They want to be assured that there will
be no political changes which would threaten their new interests or potential
ones.

An important article in THE
NEW YORK TIMES recently described what has been called a new "great
game" in the region, drawing an analogy to the competition between
Russia and Great Britain in the northwest frontier of the Indian subcontinent
in the nineteenth century. The authors of the article wrote that,

"Now, in the years after the cold war, the United
States is again establishing suzerainty over the empire of a former foe.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union has prompted the United States to
expand its zone of mili- tary hegemony into Eastern Europe (through NATO)
and into formerly neutral Yugoslavia. And -- most important of all -- the
end of the cold war has permitted America to deepen its involvement in
the Middle East." (13)

Obviously, there have been
several reasons which prompted Western leaders to seek the expansion of
NATO. One of these, and an important one, has clearly been a commercial
one.

This becomes more evident
as one looks more closely at the parallel development of commercial exploitation
in the Caspian Sea region and the movement of NATO into the Balkans.

On May 22, 1992, the North
Atlantic Treay Organization issued a remarkable statement regarding the
fighting then going on in Transcaucasia. This read in part as follows:

"[The] Allies are profoundly disturbed by the continuing
conflict and loss of life. There can be no solution to the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh
or to the differences it has caused between Armenia and Azerbaijan by force.
"Any action against Azerbaijan's or any other state's territorial
integrity or to achieve political goals by force would represent a flagrant
and unacceptable violation of the principles of international law. In particular
we [NATO] could not accept that the recognized status of Nagorno- Karabakh
or Nakhichevan can be changed unilaterally by force." (14)

This was a remarkable statement
by any standards. For NATO was in fact issuing a veiled warning that it
might have to take "steps" to prevent actions by governments
in the Cas- pian Sea region which it construed as threatening vital Western
interests.

Two days before NATO made
this unusual declaration of interest in Transcaucasion affairs, an American
oil Company, Chevron, had signed an agreement with the government of Kazakhstan
for the development of the Tengiz and Korolev oil fields in the Western
part of the country. The negotiations for this agreement had been under
way for two years prior to its being signed. And reliable sources have
reported that they were in danger of breaking down at the time because
of Chevron's fears of political instability in the region. (15)

At the time that NATO made
its declaration, of course, there would have been little possibility of
backing up its warning. There was, first of all, no precedent at all for
any large, out-of-area operation by NATO. NATO forces, furthermore, were
far removed from Transcaucasia. It does not take a long look at a map of
the Balkans, the Black Sea the Caspian Sea to realize that the situation
is changing.

REFERENCES:

13. Jacob
Heilbrunn and Michael Lind, "The Third American Empire", THE
NEW YORK TIMES, January 2, 1996.